Evolutionary Computation in Scheduling

9Scheduling of Robotic Disassembly in Remanufacturing Using Bees Algorithms

Jiayi Liu¹, Wenjun Xu¹, Zude Zhou¹, and Duc Truong Pham²

¹ School of Information Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China

² Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

9.1 Introduction

Low resource utilization and high environmental pollution are the major deficiencies of traditional manufacturing. It is said that in China, there are approximately 20 million mobile phones and 5 million cars scrapped every year [1]. Improper handling of end‐of‐life (EOL) products will cause resource‐wasting and environmental pollution [2]. Given this situation, remanufacturing is studied to protect the environment and to save manufacturing resources by making full use of EOL products [3]. It takes both economic development and environmental protection into considerations by reusing the EOL products [4]. In the remanufacturing process, it is necessary to consider the disassembly process to obtain the high‐value components. However, the disassembly process is usually executed by manual labor due to its high complexity. Robotic disassembly is recently being paid great attention because of the high automation potential. The cognitive robotics [5], its basic behavior control strategy [6], and learning/revision strategies [7] have been studied to realize the automated process of disassembling the screens.

Scheduling of robotic disassembly can reduce the cost and improve the ...